


last words of a shooting star

by annoyingplant



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Angst, Hanahaki Disease, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mentions of Blood, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2020-04-19
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:35:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23737708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/annoyingplant/pseuds/annoyingplant
Summary: [The name Anemone comes from Greek and roughly means wind flower, which signifies that the wind that blows the petal open will also, eventually, blow the dead petals away.It symbolizes protection against evil and ill wishes, the approach of a rain storm when the petals close up, forsaken or forgotten love and affection, anticipation and excitement for something in the future.]He doesn’t know who, doesn’t care to know, that is, until Nishinoya claps him on the back during practice and the pain in his chest seems to swell tenfold and Kei’s vision blurs red. He doubles over, hand desperately clasped over his mouth. Over panicked shouts of his name, calls for the school nurse, Kei swallows. Kei swallows petals and thorns and that harmless love of his scratches up his throat and leaves him gasping for air, bent over the gym floors.
Relationships: Nishinoya Yuu/Tsukishima Kei
Comments: 7
Kudos: 95





	last words of a shooting star

**Author's Note:**

> edit: i changed the title listen to mitski

It starts off harmless enough. A slight rasp in his throat, difficulty breathing. It’s nothing more than the slight pain when he breathes and this too, shall pass and Kei will be fine in a matter of days.

It starts off harmless enough, but by the time Kei finds himself coughing into his palm to then discreetly discard off a handful of red petals he knows he isn’t going to last.

Of course this would happen to him, of all people, of course. Kei’d always been convinced he wouldn’t fall in love, ever. It wasn’t made for him, the warm embraces and gentle smiles of love, undeserving as he is.

Now, that red string of fate wound tightly around his neck, choking on his self-inflicted pain, maybe he was right.

The pain grows to be unbearable, but still Kei drags himself to school, to practice. If he’s going to succumb to this, suffocate from his own overflowing love, an end as pathetic as it gets, he’ll make it so no one knows. Not his family, friends, classmates or teammates. Not of his disease, his suffering, his pathetic, sad, unrequited and fruitless love that he’s tried to bury so deep inside his chest, it sprouted and flowered.

Kei doesn’t know who the object of his affection is, he doesn’t care to know, doesn’t  _ want _ to know. Even if he did, it wouldn’t do him any good to know the name of some straight guy his own unreasonable heart seems to cling to. Kei’s pathetic, stupid,  _ painful _ love would stay unrequited forever and Kei is fated to be unhappy and suffering.

There are days when he can’t feel the tips of his fingers over the pain in his chest, when he ducks into the school bathrooms and vomits a swirl of red into the squat toilet. Sharp petals that cling to the inside of his throat and make him lose his lunch too.

He doesn’t know who, doesn’t care to know, that is, until Nishinoya claps him on the back during practice and the pain in his chest seems to swell tenfold and Kei’s vision blurs red. He doubles over, hand desperately clasped over his mouth. Over panicked shouts of his name, calls for the school nurse, Kei swallows. Kei swallows petals and thorns and that harmless love of his scratches up his throat and leaves him gasping for air, bent over the gym floors.

The scent of linoleum fills his mouth, his whole being and his nose stings like he’d inhaled water, but when Kei looks at the palms he’d pressed over his face, they are red. For a mere second, he feels pity for himself. What a miserable existence he’d been, he’s right now; desperately trying to hold his feelings down, swallow and move on, laying on the gym floor, coughing up blood.

Nishinoya kneels in front of him, worry stark on his face. He reaches out to place a hand on his shoulder and Kei coughs up an entire red windflower.

_ Oh _ .

Oh, Kei thinks, as he vomits a bouquet of petals and flowers and stems and thorns, so many thorns, sticky with blood and heavy with the seed of emotion he’d buried and forgotten in his chest.

* * *

Kei wakes in a bed in the nurse’s office, clean and pathetic.

He takes a breath and hates the way his lungs protest, ripped apart by rooting flowers and double-edged feelings.

He isn’t even granted the decency of wallowing in his own pain and pity for a mere minute, though. Nishinoya sits at his bedside. The curtain is drawn around them, but Kei can still hear hushed voices on the other side.

“Why didn’t you say anything,” Nishinoya asks, but it’s not a question at all. His eyes are red like Kei’s existence and his brows are furrowed with a kind of worry he’s never seen on him before.

Kei doesn’t think about Nishinoya waiting at his side, and his chest doesn’t hurt with more than just rooting flowers digging through his flesh.

He opens his mouth, but instead of words, flowers come tumbling out. Bright, stark red, they come to rest on top his clean white sheets and beneath the unbearable pain in his throat and the taste of blood in his mouth, Kei feels dirtied, exposed.

Nishinoya fetches a cup of water and a notepad from the nightstand and offers them to Kei. He almost sounds like he’s accusing him when he says, “We could’ve helped,” and doesn’t meet Kei’s gaze.

Kei scoffs, and the red-hot pain in his lungs that runs up the small of his back from just that reminds him of that affection he’ll carry with him in the depths of his lungs to his grave.

_ No, you couldn’t have. _

He writes on the notepad and shows it to Nishinoya who scowls at it.

“You-” He starts too loudly, hands clenched into fists on top of his lap so tight, his knuckles are as white as the sheets that Kei is picking petals off of. “You,” Nishinoya continues, brows pulling together and gaze shifting as he notices Kei watching him.

“You don’t know that. You’re plenty popular.” His bottom lip trembles just slightly as he talks. “Any girl would have been lucky to have you.”   
  
Kei shakes his head and Nishinoya stands abruptly, fists shaking at his sides with barely contained anger, pain, fear? “So you’re just going to die? You-you, Tsukishima!”

The voices on the other side of the curtain pause and Nishinoya stops. His gaze flicks from there to Kei and back for a second and eventually, he takes a breath to settle back down. “Whoever it is, I’m sure, we-we could talk to her. She’ll understand, you-- Tsukishima, you’re a good person, she’ll--”

Kei holds up a new page of the notepad before Nishinoya can finish.

_ I’m gay. _

Nishinoya blinks and Kei watches him realize and suppresses the urge to reach out for him and smooth over the furrow of his brow. 

There’s a pang in his chest and for a moment he’s sure any second now a flower the size of his yearning will force his mouth open from the inside and bloom a beautiful macabre red over his face, nurtured by the seemingly infinite amount of times he’s refused to think about his love.

“But, you can’t just,” Nishinoya is reaching for words and Kei waits with the patience of someone who isn’t set to die within the next month or so. “You can’t just give up!”

_ Yes, I can. _

“What, you’ve already accepted it?” Nishinoya says, suddenly angry, voice quiet but stern. “You could at least try!”

_ I don’t want to. _

Nishinoya stops at that and Kei pauses too. He swears, there are tears forming in the corners of Nishinoya’s eyes. But Kei blinks and they’re gone.

Funny. Kei is the doomed one, not Nishinoya, yet the most Kei can muster for himself is hollow apathy and empty pity for someone who was never enough and would never be, someone who’d always be undeserving.

He says something so quiet Kei doesn’t hear. He cocks his head, about to lift the pen to ask Nishinoya to repeat it, when he opens his mouth and does. “You’re a coward, Tsukishima.”

That, Kei stops, and blinks, and feels anger flare up in the pits of his stomach where he hadn’t felt anything since he first blossomed. A cold wave of fury washes over him, so unlike the hot, burning of pain, of love.

He writes, fast, and with such weight behind it, his pen almost pierces the paper several times.

_ I can’t convince a straight guy to like me back no matter how hard I try! _

Nishinoya’s lips purse into a flat angry line, and he takes a breath to counter, but before he can, Kei flips to a new page and scribbles faster, holding it in front of him and showing it to Nishinoya like an accusation.

_ I’m not a coward, I’m a realist. _

“No!” Nishinoya says, loudly enough to make Kei flinch. “Tsukishima, you’re both.  _ You _ may have come to terms with the fact that you’re going to die, but you never gave  _ us _ the chance to do the same!”

_ I didn’t want you to see-- _

Nishinoya does not wait for Kei to finish writing this time, instead squeezes his eyes shut so he can’t see Kei’s pathetic defenses. “We could have helped, we could have made it easier, but you never even tried to get better!”

_ It wouldn’t have worked-- _

“No, maybe it wouldn’t have!” He interjects before Kei can finish his argument. “But we could have  _ tried _ .”

Kei swears he feels the budding flowers in his lungs grow heavier and heavier, even as he angrily tears off the page he’d been writing on. What does Nishinoya know, what could he possibly know about what Kei has been going through?

He didn’t just decide to drown in flowers one day and be done with it!

“Tsukishima,” Nishinoya says as Kei tears off this page as well to shove in Nishinoya’s face, “I don’t want you to die.”

_ I’m in love with you _ .

The moment Kei sees realization wash across Nishinoya’s face, the pain in his chest suddenly becomes unbearable. Good, he thinks, somewhere in the back of his mind, if he dies now he won’t have to watch Nishinoya blame himself, or worse, pretend to love him out of pity.

The pain travels up his chest and burns more with every nerve it passes until Kei can’t take it anymore and retches blood red windflowers over the side of the bed.

A hand on his shoulder, gentle but insistent, pushing him back into his pillow as Kei holds his chest and dry heaves. “Stop, stop, stop, Tsukishima!” Nishinoya says, like that would halt the ever-growing flower in his throat.

“Look at me,” another hand under his chin, pulling him close so his eyes meet Nishinoya’s. “Look at me,” he says again, more insistent. Kei already is, he doesn’t know where else to look.

Nishinoya kisses him, a firm press of his lips against Kei’s and when he pulls just far enough away to look Kei in the eye again, his lips are stained red with blood as well. “Me too.”

“N-no,” Kei half-says, half-coughs, bringing a hand up to push Nishinoya away.

“Yes,” Nishinoya answers, catching Kei’s hand in his. He brings it up to his mouth, slowly pressing gentle barely-there kisses onto each and every single digit, staining them red in turn as well.

Kei squeezes his eyes shut tight and doesn’t look. He doesn’t mean it. He could never, Nishinoya wouldn’t. He could do so much better than Kei, than some idiot who can’t pull his head out of his own ass far enough to admit he’s suffering, to ask for help and accept it. Some idiot who’s own repressed emotions are rotting him from the inside out.

Nishinoya takes Kei’s other hand too, holds the other tightly as he continues with this one, and Kei gasps when he feels him link their fingers. He’d never seen him act as gentle or as carefully with something as he can feel him right now.

“Tsukishima.” Kei cracks open an eye, slowly, like looking at Nishinoya directly would blind him. “I’m in love with you.”

And Nishinoya says it so softly, like it’s only meant for Kei, still holding Kei’s blood-stained fingers in his, says it so sincerely, that for a moment it’s easy for Kei to forget all about being unlovable and undeserving and the thorns in his lungs. He says it so easily, it makes Kei want to believe him.

**Author's Note:**

> haha ow my twitter is @annoyedplant


End file.
